Hi guys, cant believe I have never stumbled across spiceworks before now.

After working a few year on the IT / Help Desk (Aeronautics Toulouse) I have decided to try and advance my skills a little further in the field and hopefully become a Windows Server Administrator / Windows Systems Administrator.

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I am by far not as experienced as other people on here. I was a technical support specialist for 7 months. During those 7 months I messed around with AD, BES, UPS's, Windows server 2003, and exchange on a daily basis. This allowed me to land a job as a systems admin where I currently am. I knew nothing compared to what I know now after being a system admin for a small business for 1 year. I know so much more now and have became way more marketable.

A year and a half ago I would look at job postings and be like I can do 2 of the 10 things mentioned. Now it's more like I can do 9 out of the 10 things mentioned. Not trying to toot my horn here but you have more experience than I had prior to landing a sys admin job. I would start applying like crazy to places and try to find a nice small business where you will be under a senior system admin. You can read all the courses and books in the world but in my opinion, nothing beats experience. Start applying for that position dude.

Training such as Train Signal will teach you theory and 1 way to implement something which is a really good start. But unfortunately the real world scenarios are rarely in line with the cirriculum. If you are going to self study, try to discipline yourself into developing real world scenarios and then build solutions for them. Also, use forums like these to post questions. You will see, alot of IT people are VERY opinionated about how something should be done. But the important thing to remember is that all of these opinions come from real world implementations of solutions. Of course they are based on thier specific environments and biases. Learn to weed the biases out because that in itself is a real world scenario. For example: My boss came to me and said put this order in. It was for a 5 server blade implementation. I said what are these servers going to be used for? He said, I like the idea of using blade technology for our environment. Long story short they are getting surplused now and have never been fully implemented.

Everything I know on the subject was learned in the trenches. That's not to say I haven't read a book or two on the subject and then applied what I've learned. While I've nothing against courses and etc, what they teach is best case so to speak. IF you really want to learn how everything works, let it go off the rails, what you'll learn is invaluable. That teaches you how it really works, and how everything inter-connects.

All things considered, I've a couple of Ph.D's than from the School of Hard Knocks!

Build yourself an environment, and then do things to break it. Find out how to fix it, and go from there. The biggest thing you'll learn isn't so much knowing the answer, but defining the question.

Training programs give an abstract idea of how to do something. Labs give you a hands on feel for how that works. Experience gives you a feel for how doing those tasks actually impact an environment.

So.

Training programs are good and Train Signal has a great reputation. Simulated labs are good and setting up your own lab is a even better. And best of all is getting grounded in the theory, getting your feet wet in a lab, then being responsible for helping troubleshoot problems with a production environment.

While I never took the test, my MCSE coursework has provided me with a LOT of food for thought at different points... However... I think I can count on one hand where I've used things that I learned specifically from there that I didn't pick up somewhere else first.

And again I can say with my CCNA that it is just about the most expensive piece of paper I've ever had. VERY useful if you are obsessed with using command line instead of just opening up the GUI that all of these lovely companies work so hard on.

I've met time and time again people with a Bachelors in Comp Sci that couldn't clean up a virus or do a basic script in SQL to save their lives... BUT they can tell you the voltage used on the 386 CPU.

Certs get your foot in the door for the interview. If the person interviewing you is a real IT person and all you have is certs... you're screwed...

If the person has no flippin clue, then congrats! You've got a great new job!

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